SPARK Museum is built for discovery

Everything at SPARK Museum is built for discovery. Whether it’s from viewing a sparkling, 10-foot-tall Tesla coil or from sticking small, inflated balloons to their heads, everyone who enters SPARK gets to discover the power and wonder of electrical energy. Truly, it is a place of scientific interaction — where people young and old can see, touch and listen their way to stimulating discovery.

What’s more, SPARK Museum in Bellingham IS the history of discovery through scientific method. Many of the myriad authentic artifacts on display in the Museum were themselves actually used by brilliant scientists of old to demonstrate profound principles or revelations of electricity.

From floor to ceiling, wall to wall, SPARK is a 25,000-square-foot wonderland dedicated to evincing the wonderful creative process that is the scientific method. Visitors need just one look at the fantastic contraptions and clever devices that fill SPARK to know it’s true. Seeing live sparks exploding out of unassuming Leyden jars, for example, gives everyone pause and surprise. We see that spark of wonder light up visitors’ faces day in and day out, and it NEVER gets old. That look is the process of scientific discovery at work.

No matter what the demonstration, the same questions always arise:

• “What could it be?”
• “Why does it act the way it does?”
• “How do I know what I know?”
• “Could the spark on my machine be the same thing as a bolt of lightning from the sky?”

Or consider these questions entertained by Mary Shelley as she crafted her clever tale of Doctor Frankenstein’s twisted experiment:

• “Could this be the Spark of Life? Is the human battery dead and just needs a jump? A jolt?”

These are all great questions with magical forces, and the answers revealed are always fun, always surprising, instructive, and yes: enlightening.